Friday, May 11

 

 

Today started out even hotter than yesterday. At some point during the day the temperature will reach 24 degrees.

As I washed and shaved I realised that Lidl had not let me down. My long-lasting razor blade had snapped to indicate it had stopped working just as I finished shaving. The shaving foam had given up a few moments before, gurgling out just enough foam for the blade’s final performance.

If I need a motto in life then perhaps I could use “See Chevrolet estate, photograph Chevrolet estate”. Certainly as I see the vehicle parked outside Alepa, as I cycle to the metro, my instinctive reaction is to leap off my bike and start taking photographs before it drives away. I maintain this sense of urgency even when I spot that the driver has vanished. I do not recognise the model and I don’t even feel confident identifying the approximate year. I start out thinking 1965 and end up suspecting 1971 might prove more accurate.

When I get to Arcada I will, of course, find it very nearly deserted. After some time Fred and Monica will join me.

I will begin by trying to book flights and a hotel for Edmedia in Amsterdam at the end of June. The Travel service that Arcada uses will refuse to show me any combination of flights and hotels that will fit inside the budget Nathalie gave me. I will switch to ebooker which will give me a range of options but refuse to give me a Finnair flight. I will switch to the Finnair site and manage to book a flight at a viable price at sane times.

I will then repeat this process for the hotel. Travel will refuse to show any hotels in Amsterdam at less than about 250€ per night. I will switch to ebooker and find plenty of options, none of them near the conference venue. I will spend forty minutes with Google Maps plotting journeys from various hotels to the conference. Eventually I will find a 23 minute journey that involves a nonstop local train shuttle service, as opposed to the two or three bus journeys the others seem to require. I will read the reviews, decide I have spent enough time on this, and book it.

I will then arrange the Interactive Storytelling session for next Tuesday, based on the results of the questionnaire I put on Its Learning. We will have a rapid-fire session that combines Blocks 3 and 4.

I will then begin the process of getting the job’d and MakeSomeNoise sites online. Complications will set in immediately as Linode migrate Buddyschool.fi from one server to another and it promptly goes offline. I will go for a walk to think about this and decide that, if I can get into the server via ftp, then Apache must have failed. I will have guessed correctly and, once I have gone round the block, I will sit down at my laptop and restart Apache.

I will then set up a new Linode for the two new sites, set up subdomains, and upload the files. In my hope I will misconfigure the DNS settings for Job’d and it will redirect to Convivial Mechanics. I will fix this but the redirection will persist on Firefox. I will flush the cache in several different ways but it will still happen. I will have no idea whether the problem lies at the server end or in Firefox. I will have to go to the lab, open Firefox and check there. It will work properly, meaning that I cannot, for some reason, complete clear Firefox’s cache. Which in turn makes correcting errors very difficult indeed.

Eventually everything will work properly, as far as I can tell, and Irma can now show demo versions of both sites next week.

I will leave Arcada and head to Kamppi where we will meet to say an early “Happy Mother’s Day” to Irma’s mother. Naa will already have arrived, and we will bring the outside chair up from the cellar. When Irma arrives I will carry a big outdoor basket of roses up and we will attach it to the balcony railing.